Mary Carter (1) (1970–)

Ronan gambles away his family's pub (in his defence, it was a 4 aces hand) to his horrible uncle, who wants to turn it into a tanning salon. His 6 sisters, rather than seeing it go to Uncle Joe, raffle the pub off in America. Carlene buys a $20 raffle ticket at an Irish festival in Ohio, and wins. She moves to Ireland to make a go of running the pub and chaos and romance ensue.

This is pure chick-lit. Heavy on romance, light on sex, with a lot of humour and some odd pranks thrown into the mix. I enjoyed it, but it's long; longer than it needed to be and the beginning was a slog; I wasn't necessarily interested in the blow-by-blow of Ronan losing the pub, or Carlene's history of bad luck. Once past that though the story picked up pace and I thought Ronan's gambling and Carlene's father's OCD added a much needed depth to the story. The twist at the end was pretty effective too.

If you've a weakness for the Irish (who doesn't?) and are in the mood for a mostly feel-good read that celebrates, first and foremost, the power of friendship and community, you might enjoy this one.… (mer)

Pros:

- Set in Ireland

- Truly engaging, flawed characters that made them very human and very likable

- Narrator was good and accents were done well enough that it didn't detract from story

- Portrayed a character with OCD and did it well

- Contained enough mysteries to keep me engaged and wondering what was up

- Was sorry when the book ended because I really liked getting to know the characters

- Humor (I laughed out loud several times)

- Did a really good job with the pub talk... it really felt like I was there, listening to drunk people having a conversation (audiobooks are great for this!)

- Got to see the growth of a lot of the characters, mainly the two main characters and the dad

Cons:

- Sometimes felt like too much detail over extraneous stuff (almost reminded of a NaNoWriMo novel with extra words put in for the purposes of a word count)

- That made some scenes have a 'dragging on' feeling, but overall, I wanted to read more about the characters, so that's definitely not a big deal/deal-breaker!

- A lot of extra characters that orbited around the main characters, but we didn't get to learn too much about them.... probably because there's only so much you can put in one book and still get the story out that you want to tell!

- But I was left wondering certain things... (no spoilers)... But for example: Why did the twins give that speech to the main character? What was the deal with the woman in the museum? I can only hope we get some spinoff novels! :)… (mer)